Author: Outsourcing Center, Karthik Nagendra, Business Writer

The rich and long history of outsourcing—now around 200 years if you consider outsourcing for agriculture, manufacturing, accounting and now medical opinion—has evolved to be a more complex process over the years. Today’s outsourcing is for tasks that are mission critical for enterprises worldwide. These include outsourcing for high-end tasks such as product design and engineering, strategic outsourcing of functions and niche skills that require innovation, and others that can transform processes and make them more efficient. Outsourcing has moved away from mere cost savings, which was the traditional de facto factor for outsourcing, towards value addition or enabling companies…

If you’ve been able to resist outsourcing while the world around you is doing it, that’s great. However, it might be a good idea to start looking at the outsourcing option if you’re seeing one or more of the following happening in your company. 1. You just can’t find the right people. If you find that, despite spreading the word among friends, colleagues and acquaintances in person and on social networks, there are very few applicants for the open positions you’re trying to fill, it means there’s a shortage of such skills on your side of the woods. Skills shortage…

When a practicing physician and a Ph.D. in biochemistry/molecular genetics decided to co-found a new company, it wouldn’t be amiss to expect that it would operate in the healthcare industry. Jamison Feramisco, as co-founder of a secure web and mobile application that enabled remote diagnosis of dermatology cases, dramatically reduced wait times for patients while driving increased revenues for providers. When an architect decided to join Autodesk to help them write programs for their Architectural CAD software, it was understood that she would bring the knowledge of the subject matter – architecture, in this case – to the product being…

The healthcare industry may have been cautious to a fault until recently, but it is readily embracing new technologies including the cloud to serve customers better. Recently, articles have popped up highlighting how robots will help with procedures connected to hair transplants. While helping people look good is a lofty enough aim, an even better goal for robots would be to help people regain health. In fact, scientists and medical personnel are working to do precisely this. The thing about robots performing surgery, apart from regulatory and safety concerns, is that they need to be equipped with enough knowledge, or…

Those who thought cloud computing was just a passing fad are learning that it is made of more solid stuff. That said, severe competition could still rip a large hole through some clouds. Read on for some pointers to stay afloat. Even as we talk, the two companies that dwarf all other cloud providers, Amazon and Microsoft, are slugging it out on the price front. By far the leader of the pack, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) dropped prices for select services by as much as 22 percent. Microsoft immediately reacted by reducing its own prices to match and then some.…

Why do people want to bring their own device to work? There are two main reasons. First, employees, especially the new millennials, are more comfortable with their own mobile devices. They have never lived without them. Secondly, company hardware is, well, clunky, outdated and difficult to use—what we have at home is superior technology. There are other reasons and IT departments are sometimes shy to admit them, but people expect devices to work and IT organizations can be painfully slow to respond. Other times there just isn’t enough in the budget to let everyone have the device they want. This…

Markets are becoming interconnected. Cloud, virtualization, mobility and social media are changing how people work and interact. These technologies are transforming how goods and services are created and distributed. They are restructuring how manufacturers price their products, what they choose to produce and what they invest in. But the most significant change has become apparent only recently: technology that once helped businesses become more productive so that they could compete in open markets are now changing the very nature of what constitutes competition—moving from fighting competitors to fighting market transitions. Global companies are quickly learning that they need to be…

Everyone loves hybrid models. Who doesn’t want the best of both worlds? IT organizations everywhere crave “a little bit of this and a little bit of that” approach to spread their risk. They want to keep control over infrastructure, business critical apps, data and processes that help preserve IP or enable a competitive edge while partnering with service providers to manage the everyday and mundane. Cloud is no different. Businesses tend to be naturally cautious about sensitive customer and business data. They prefer to host it within their control to make it more secure. Control is reassuring. Besides, it isn’t…

In late September, high-profile cloud storage start up Nirvanix told its customers to stop replicating data on its servers and migrate to other providers like Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer and Amazon S3. For several reasons, Nirvanix, sitting on a tidy $70 million in funding, was shutting down . Users had until October 15 to download their data. It was a wakeup call for the community of cloud providers, users and technology analysts. Business compulsions can take a heavy toll on cloud users. And incidents such as these where a cloud provider shuts down practically overnight gives credence to the voice…

For centuries, banks have built their business models on the foundation of customer confidentiality. Secrecy and security are by-words in the world of banking. How can they be expected to embrace social media, a platform where things appear to be “open” and “public”? There is much for banks and financial institutions to worry about when it comes to social media given that compliance and regulation cannot be compromised. But it is a different kind of worry now: leverage social media or risk losing their customers. Many of them know they cannot ignore the fact that social media puts them in…